I've been with Wolfram Research in some capacity since 1993, and have worked on the Mathematica front end since 1996. While Wolfram tolerates and even occasionally encourages my appearances in user forums like this one, my words (especially the stupid ones) are my own, and I don't speak for Wolfram in an official capacity.

Fun facts: I also like games of all sorts, and I'm a competitive Scrabble® player. I've written various sorts of crossword game-related utilities (some fun, some dead ends, some serious) in Mathematica, and consulted briefly on Wolfram|Alpha's word game content. I also contributed UI code to an open source crossword game simulator called Quackle which is quite the thing in the competitive player community.

Possible bug with second argument of DynamicI was considerably less confident than Rolf. Especially when I tried it in a development build, and it behaved worse. But then I fixed it. So I guess my confidence matches Rolf's, now. :) Beta testers should see this in the next beta build.

The dangers of SaveDefinitions — should this really happen?I never use SaveDefinitions. Just never. It's terribly convenient, but for my purposes, it is just not sufficiently predictable. And it can sometimes be incredibly inefficient (e.g., when it stores ridiculous amounts of definitions which were hidden behind a Needs or Get).

Sep12

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undisputed FrontEndTokenExecuteI'm very happy to see answers using the under-utilized Cells function. But I'm not sure what you mean by your statement that this "doesn't use the front end". Both Cells and NotebookDelete require a front end to work properly, and they're implemented by causing the kernel to issue commands to the front end. Incidentally, code very similar to this is in the Applications Examples section of the Cells documentation.

Incorrect information displayed when slider is moved (intermittent)@Mr.Wizard Localizing t would require throwing multiple Blocks into the code to preserve the output form (which would not be preserved by DynamicModule, etc.). I agree that this would be the proper thing to do, but I didn't want to complexify the answer by focusing on points the author didn't ask. Nonetheless, I will point out for posterity that Mr.Wizard is right in saying this is not the code as I would have written it.

Automatically close Mathematica@Kuba it's not possible to do anything like what you're asking for globally for arbitrary Mathematica commands. If you're sticking to fully documented Mathematica functions, you shouldn't ever see interactive prompts unless that's the purpose of the function (e.g., Input). But many of the FE tokens were implemented only for the purpose of user interaction through the menu system, and do not represent the gold standard of end-to-end design that we generally apply to fully documented functions.

Aug26

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Automatically close Mathematica@Kuba, if you run the front end with the -server command-line option, then it will not prompt dialog boxes. But it will also not be usable by the user. This is, for example, how the kernel command UsingFrontEnd launches the kernel. Since you don't provide very much context for your question, it's not clear to me whether this is a useful answer to your question.

Alternative to NotebookLocate or NotebookFindSurely, you want instead NotebookRead /@ Cells[EvaluationNotebook[], CellTags -> "CellTag"]. By using First, you're only getting the first of many cells, or generating an error condition when you try to get the first of zero cells.

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